How do you remove a century-old mural from a former synagogue, shuttle it down the street about three-tenths of a mile, and keep it all intact?

Carefully — there's priceless history on that wall.

The chipping paint and plaster dates to 1910, when Burlington's eastern European Jewish community hired Ben Zion Black to paint what was then the Chai Adam synagogue.

The building was converted to apartments in 1986, and the paint was covered up until last year, when preservationists Aaron Goldberg and Jeff Potash launched a campaign to cut the mural from the building and save it.

"This is a first-class team that is doing a museum-quality stabilization, preservation and removal process," Goldberg said. "So no, I'm not nervous at this stage. I'm extremely excited that having walled off the mural in 1986, that it's finally going to see the light of day."

Months of preparation are going into the move. Anyone interested in seeing the mural in its original location has two final chances to view it this week.

A wooden structure has been built at the Hyde Street building, which will eventually envelop the mural from the outside, protecting it from weather and allowing crews to remove slate roof tiles to get access to the mural.

"We're literally removing the roof of the building," said Marcel Beaudin, the project architect, "because there's no practical way to remove the mural from the plasters attached to the roof."

Beaudin, an experienced Burlington architect known for designing the Burlington Boathouse and other projects, helped to craft the whole concept of the move. He had worked on remodeling Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, and he suggested that the mural might fit there.

The mural will squeeze into its new home with only inches to spare, Beaudin said.

"I'm saying the good Lord meant this to happen," he said.

The key to the whole process is a steel cage, which will frame and support the mural in the spring when a crane removes it from the building and a truck drives it down the street to be displayed at Ohavi Zedek Synagogue.

"None of the regular rules of construction work," said engineer Bob Neeld, president of Engineering Ventures in Burlington. To the best of his knowledge, he said, no one has ever tried to move a three-dimensional piece like this. The mural covers three panels that come together, forming a triangular slanted roof.

Workers on the outside have to be careful about small details — like using hammers that won't disturb the mural. Too much vibration could loosen the plaster.

As Great Northern Construction crews build around the mural, its supporters continue to raise money for the project.

The fundraising campaign has raised about $300,000, said Goldberg, the project leader, with at least $150,000 left to go. The move will be the most difficult and most expensive part of the project, the organizers said in a news release.

Supporters have piled up: The project has been endorsed by Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin and Joshua Perelman, chief curator of the National Museum of Jewish American History, among others.

Samuel Gruber, a Jewish studies scholar, has been the project's chief historical consultant. He examines the significance of the mural, which depicts two tablets of the Ten Commandments and would have been seen over the synagogue's Torah.

The mural has been cleaned — revealing colors under decades of dirt and grime. The curtains, which once appeared green, are now bright blue.

"In an old synagogue, in the Vermont winter, for instance, this vibrant colors really would have shone above the ark and above the whole east of the synagogue," Gruber said.

Gruber believes that the vibrant blue in the painted curtains corresponds to the blue curtains in the Tabernacle described in the book of Numbers.

Most of the original synagogue was lost as the building turned into apartments. An inscription used to stand above the Ark of the Torah.

"When you examine it very closely, you see the ghost of some of the letters," Gruber said. He said he believes it is part of a prayer that Jews would say as they entered the synagogue.

Gruber has lectured about the mural at the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, D.C. The mural's artist came from Lithuania, and the artwork preserves Jewish traditions from before World War II.

"It speaks to a much larger eastern European rural Jewish experience that functionally is gone," Potash, one of the leaders of the project, said in an earlier interview with the Burlington Free Press.

When the move is finally complete sometime next year, Ohavi Zedek Synagogue expects it to become a "local, national and international educational resource," said Peter Pelaia, the synagogue's executive director.

"The start of construction work is a major milestone," Pelaia said in a statement. "It is now no longer a case of 'if' we will be able to move the mural, now it is only 'when.' "

Contact April Burbank at (802) 660-1863 or aburbank@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AprilBurbank

If you go:

What: Public viewings of the Lost Shul Mural before it moves to a new location in the spring